/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

The notion of a vanguard is not a notion of a political elite, though it can decay into one, but rather it is a notion of a highly developed strata of professional revolutionaries who guide the proletariat simply because of the fact that they had better access to political education. Sometimes this is described as "the most advanced section of the proletariat" but we often find not merely highly educated and motivated proletarians in the vanguard, but also plenty of bourgeois class traitors in (Engels), class traitors from the nobility (Felix Dzerzhinsky, Zhou Enlai) peasants (Lenin, Mao), the child of a plantation owner (Castro), and petty bourgeoisie (Marx himself, at least the young Marx, before his exile and relative poverty and England).

In the 19th century and early 20th century, this vanguard naturally contained many class traitors, since political education was rarely extended to the working class. Marx had maids, even in his apartment in London, and Lenin employed housekeepers even in his exile to a cabin in Siberia. This was a group of unusually educated professional revolutionaries who did so much reading, so much writing, so much public speaking, and attended so many meetings, that they did not have time to cook their own meals, do their own laundry, wash their own dishes, and could not have done so even if they wanted to. They needed help with basic domestic tasks from the very workers they wanted to liberate.

Today it is different. The worker can listen to the entire Marxist-Leninist canon as audiobooks while attending to the menial tasks which occupy daily life, both at work and at home. The worker can publish their thoughts to a site such as this easily, without needing access to a publishing company or a printing press. A worker can attend a party meeting in the form of a video call, while driving. This enables the worker to be every bit as involved in the theoretical half of the class struggle (reading theory, writing theory, speaking publicly, attending meetings) as they already were in the practical half of the class struggle (working, striking, fighting, dying). This calls into question whether the vanguard is the individual in a suit sitting in an office publishing theses against bourgeois rivals while servants bring tea and warm meals, or whether the vanguard is the individual who listens to Marx and Lenin while washing dishes.